Hir's lookin' at you, kid

Ever watch one of those reverse explosion videos? You know, the ones where a field of rubble abruptly leaps into the air and, amidst clamor and flame, recombobulates into some placidly prosaic architecture. Not hard to see why these grainy vignettes go viral on the Web: they offer a fleeting, if illusory, respite from the tragic juggernaut of entropy.

Taylor Mac’s two act tragifarce Hir unfolds just such a tableau. Filing into the intimate black box Annex for the play’s Canadian premiere, we’re immediately plunged into the anarchy of a ticky-tacky starter home that's gone to seed.

It looks like Value Village after a tsunami. Dirty laundry piles up in drifts all over the floor. A berm of overturned furniture barricades the front door. The kitchen counter is piled high with dishes, comatose appliances and food scraps.

Menopausal matriarch Paige (Deb Williams) keeps jettisoning fresh bilge into these billows of scuzz. Most prominent flotsam in the whole squalid vortex is her husband, Arnold (Andrew Wheeler) – or what’s left of him after a stroke has strangled his speech and reduced him to a diapered, drop-footed, cringing hemiplegic.

That represents an upgrade, as far as Paige is concerned, from the wife-beating, rage-sputtering lout that fathered her two offspring. To celebrate her liberation from him, she daubs helpless Arnold with clown make-up, keeps him togged in a frilly housedress, plies him with estrogen-laced smoothies and douses him with a dog-training spritz bottle whenever he ventures near the door.

Now that Daddy can no longer wield his baseball bat bludgeon, their erstwhile daughter, teenaged Max (Jordan Fowlie), has seized the chance to gender-transition into a fuzz-faced young stripling. Ze’s fluent in the jargon of Queer Theory, especially the “unthemed pronouns.” Ze can be very particular about how you address hir.

No wonder Isaac (Victor Dolhai), the family’s prodigal eldest son, throws up as soon as he enters the house after his dishonorable discharge from the Middle East frontlines of America’s Forever War. Not that he’d been exactly homesick for the patriarchal hell-hole he fled three years ago. To escape it, he enlisted in the U.S. Army’s Mortuary Service – a permanent, rolling, battle-tested vomitorium.

But don’t take his puking personally, he urges his family. And don’t mistake it for PTSD. It’s just his conditioned reflex by now, an autonomous reaction to drastic change (such as his now unrecognizable childhood home). In the Mortuary Service, throwing up is almost a badge of honor – “it’s what we got instead of medals.”

Still, three years of scraping together the remnants of blown-apart people have instilled in him a certain tidying-up instinct. Paige may revel in the chaos of her liberation from cowed housewifery, but Isaac’s firmly in the anti-entropic camp – hence the reverse explosion.

So as soon as Mom and Max drive off for their museum-hopping “Culture Saturday,” Isaac tackles the fetor with military zeal. By the time the audience comes back from intermission, the floor and counter are clear, the furniture is all standing in place, the fresh-washed laundry is folded into neat piles and Arnold, in plaid flannels, is propped in his customary Lay-Z-Boy goggling at a Yankees game.

(If you stay in your seat through the 20-minute entr’acte, you can watch apprentice stage manager Sammie Hatch, like a black-clad Ninja, accomplish this whole transformation with a truly balletic economy of motion).

The return of the Saturday culturati, of course, ignites the inevitable reverse-reverse explosion. It’s a blast so powerful as to blow Isaac right out the door forever to join the ranks of homeless tweaker military Vets encamped on the town’s tawdry Main Street.

Paige, wrapped in the dignity of unappeasable grievance, sulks off to her corner as Arnold pisses himself. In loveless pity, Max – a baffled teen, after all, for all hir sass – is left to swab down hir diapered Dad.

Playwright Mac – a Pulitzer-nominated, MacArthur-certified Genius – is the artistic apotheosis of a drag queen. Needling and shocking us with the therapeutic precision of a skilled acupuncturist, Mac is all about ambiguities and transitions.

Hir transitions, in its two-hour course, from the slapstick physical comedy and witty trash talk of its early scenes through essayistic eloquence and caustic cruelty, ending on a note of bleak pathos. It’s a delicate exercise that director Richard Wolfe, guiding magus of Pi Theatre, brings off with aplomb.

His design crew – costumes by Carmen Alatorre, set by Patrick Rizzotti, props by Stella Garciano – coordinate seamlessly for a production so reliant on its physical layout. Composer Mishelle Cuttler manages to gin up tension with cues as subtle as the on/off white noise of an air conditioner, while lighting designer Alan Brodie turns the mere flicker of a TV screen into ominous portent.

But it’s the actors that bring it all to vivid life. There’s no “star” in Hir – the play refracts around each character in turn. Williams’ Paige is incandescent in her wholly righteous rage. Her caustic critiques likely echo the left/liberal instincts of many theatre goers, but her flippant cruelty is nauseating.

So Dolhai, as Isaac, retches on our behalf. In his wide-eyed incredulity, he’s as close as we get to an onstage proxy, while still leaving us more than a little queasy at his snappy soldiery. Wheeler, an eloquent Shakespearean interpreter of over 40-years standing, turns in a tour de force in the virtually speechless role of Arnold as the inert centre around which all the action revolves.

After a pan-Canada casting call for a transgender actor to play Max, Wolfe found a perfect match in Fowlie. Practically a teen hirself, ze projects just the right mix of bravura, vulnerability, narcissism and empathy – a hormonal tempest in an exquisitely fragile teapot.

Don’t fail to see hir – and Hir – during its remaining one-week run at the Annex through December 8th